As part of his keynote address on Sunday at the annual Consumer Electronics Show, Gates showed off Windows Home Server (more info at Ars) - a consumer device to serve as a central storage place for digital photos, music and other media. The first products are due out later this year from HP and others. The goal is to get devices that can cost less than USD 500. In the first of a two-part interview, Microsoft's chairman talks about why the average person wants a server, why they won't need a degree in computer science to run it and what hurdles remain before consumers reach the true digital home.

If someone put together a specialized Linux distro for this sort of thing, which I'm sure they will if it takes off, the set-up time could be reduced to a few minutes (using a LiveCD-based approach). The backup is nothing special, nothing that a cron job or "Scheduled task" couldn't do.

And who will market this specialized distro so that average users can buy a box, plug it in, walk through a few configuration steps, and be done? A cron job or scheduled task would likely take more time and disk space for the backup, and backup is still only one aspect of WHS.